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I’ve been thinking about buying a small video camera and mounting it on my helmet or my bike’s handlebars. At the risk of sounding macabre or fatalistic (or scaring my mum), if another road user injures or kills me when I’m out cycling, I’d like them to be held responsible. Surely a reasonable request. The problem when a bicycle and a motor vehicle collide is that one party is at a massive disadvantage. In 2007, when I got hit head-on by a car that zoomed across my path through an intersection, I had to go to hospital – they had to go to the panel-beater.

Venezuela on Wednesday proposed that OPEC set an oil price band of $80 to $120 a
barrel, Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez told Reuters, bidding to restore a policy
the cartel tried 12 years ago in a failed attempt to control prices in a tight
range by adjusting supply. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries in 2000 adopted a $22 to $28 price band, requiring its members to cut
or raise output in an effort to keep prices in that range for an OPEC basket of
crudes. The policy quickly proved unworkable, however, and increasing demand
from China pushed prices irreversibly through $30 in 2004.

Sea ice melted back super fast across the Arctic Ocean during the first two weeks of June and now covers the smallest extent ever observed for this time of year, according to the latest update posted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

The exhaust from diesel-fuelled vehicles, wood fires and coal-driven power stations contains small particles of soot that flow out into the atmosphere. The soot is a scourge for the climate but also for human health. Now for the first time, researchers have studied in detail how diesel soot gets stuck in the lungs. The results show that more than half of all inhaled soot particles remain in the body.

Scientists may hesitate to link some of the weather extremes of recent years to global warming — but the public, it seems, is already there. A poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.

North Korea dispatched soldiers to pour buckets of water on parched fields and South Korean officials scrambled to save a rare mollusk threatened by the heat as the worst dry spell in a century gripped the Korean Peninsula.

World oil inventories have risen over the past two months, aided by increased
output from Iraq and Libya, but spare production capacity remains tight, the
U.S. government said on Tuesday.
Global fuels output exceeded consumption by an average of 1 million barrels
per day in May and June, helping to push oil inventories higher and prices
lower, the Energy Information Administration said in a report, obtained by
Reuters ahead of its publication.

It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.